Letter #135: Gyeongseong Creature 2

Good morning, Erin.

I love October. 

I love the chill in the air, the falling leaves, the shortening days, the slow layering of sweaters and blankets and coats as we march further and further along. 

And I love the atmosphere, the creeping eeriness—even without being a fan of Halloween or really even the celebratory spookiness that runs throughout the month (perhaps too much) like a bone-chilling Advent, there’s something thrilling about our collective recognition that nature is abandoning us, about our reveling as the protective brightness of day recedes into a seemingly perpetual twilight.

In other words, we know what’s coming, and we spend a long time cheering for it. 

…as opposed to Gyeongseong Creature 2, which I not only forgot was a thing but would never have known was out were it not for Netflix tossing it into my “Continue Watching” queue by default. 

And about which I didn’t think I remembered very much. Fortunately, I have a repository of my impressions of all the Korean media I’ve consumed that I can open up and reference at any time! And, from what I read…well, my memory wasn’t actually all that far off, as it turned out: it was pretty good, some big flaws (especially in theme), and Claudia Kim rocks my socks. 

Which means I also correctly remembered that the ending was…weird. And a weird choice. Meaning I did not feel like I wanted or needed a reason for there to be more of this story than there already was in the first season. There wasn’t a thematic reason for it. There wasn’t a plot reason for it, apart from the one they invented in the last few moments of the finale. And then to tease that a second part would involve an 80-year time jump to 2024? Yeesh—not exactly enticing. 

But, if Netflix went through all the trouble of putting it in my queue, well…it’d be rude not to give it a try, right?

So, inject your brain with super-worms and join me, my dear seonbae, as we jump back into the sometimes exciting world of Gyeongseong Creature. 

But 80 years later. And with slightly fewer episodes. 

1. So…I quite liked it, actually. It’s almost entirely divorced from the first season in favor of basically just being an action thriller with some sci-fi elements to give it flavor—which I thought was great fun. I don’t know why they went this route, but it was a heck of a good time.

1A. Well, until the last couple of episodes (after we get the band back together, as it were), when all the writing flaws of the first season come screaming back with a vengeance, leaving me with ultimately the same score for it as for Season 1. 

1B. That said, if you were a huge fan of the first season, I don’t know exactly how you’d react to this one, because it’s not exactly the classic “same thing but different” that all good sequels are, and it’s not the “same thing but stupid” that bad sequels fall into. My guess is that fans will be disappointed that it’s mostly just a vague follow-up to the original—or just happy to see the leads meet again after so long. 

1C. But, as someone who both really enjoyed and was a bit frowny over S1, I liked it for being its own thing. I wouldn’t say there was much depth to it, but it didn’t need to be for it to entertain. So, if nothing else, I’d say it’s fun for being its own thing. 

2. Maybe this is just my memory acting up, but…were Tae-sang and Chae-ok madly in love with each other in S1? I know they got smoochy and were into each other—I’m not saying they didn’t establish a romance. But S2 treats them like they were soul mates who were ripped apart by the tragedy of fate. And I absolutely did not bring that expectation in with me. But it’s fundamental to the plot of the season, so it kinda took…I was gonna say it took away from things, but it didn’t, really. I just wasn’t as bought in on it as the show probably expected me to be, and I noticed that this was the case, is all. 

3. …did I say we were doing full spoilers? Because we’re doing full spoilers. 

4. We’ve got a few new members of the cast, and I actually knew some of them, which was nice:

• Actress Friend’s boyfriend from Thirty-Nine as the head minion antagonist guy

• the “first love” girl on the dating show from Frankly Speaking as the cop lady

• the team manager from Dream as Tae-sang’s…friend? I guess? Secret guardian? 

• IU’s deaf grandmother from My Mister as fake Lady Maeda

4A. We’ve got a Dream mini-reunion with the guy who plays Tae-sang and his new friend. Business partner. Keeper? Whatever—they’re back together, is all I’m getting at. 

4B. And, abstractly, I just saw the manager guy from Dream in Ultimate Weapon Alice, and both Gyeongseong Creature 2 and Alice have scenes where snow and cherry blossoms fade back and forth into each other. Coincidence…or mini-reunion? You decide!

5. One of the fun differences (...I think it’s a difference) between S2 and S1 is that S2 plays with time a bit—that is, jumps around with what it shows you at what time, but in a way that I think added a little spark to the storytelling rather than making it harder to ground yourself in what was going on (or, as in the case with the recently-discussed Sound Candy, leave you with a poor sense of the progression of time). Just one of the things that I enjoyed about this season that, even just in style, made it seem like its own thing. 

6. I’m a fan of the guy who played…well, if nothing else, he’s an antagonist, in that he stands in opposition to our protagonists. (What’s his name, google machine? Here we go: Lee Moo-saeng. That’s the actor.) Anyway, I really like this guy in all the things I’ve seen him in, so I was really happy to see he was in this, too. I had no idea if he was a vampire or a terminator or a Batman or what, when he first showed up, but I was definitely happy he was there, regardless. 

6A. He’s really good, too. Easily my favorite new character, and I desperately wish they’d had more time to dig into him—especially after they give context (beyond his sense of loyalty) to why he’s so dedicated to the company’s super-worm research. I assume they’ve set him up to come back for revenge in a potential third season, maybe, because he needs to help his injured wife/girlfriend/whoever, but…it seemed weird to introduce that side of him so close to the end of the season and not do more with it, even with the little time that was left. But, as I’ve said, it’s kind of on-brand for this series to fumble itself near the end of the season. 

6B. Anyway, not to get ahead of myself, but I’d be down for a third season, I’m pretty sure, and I’m hoping he’d be back for that. Him and his Christopher Walken haircut. 

7. Then there’s the main antagonist super-soldier kid, the one who wants to goad Tae-sang into getting his memories back—and I could not give less of a f*** about this anime reject. Ugh, he’s such a trope, and in the worst way: “I’m going to kill my way into making you love me, again, senpai! And then, when it works, I’ll be a good guy and no one will care that I’m a multi-murderer!” Which, okay, I’m maybe exaggerating or oversimplifying, but that’s pretty much what he was. I didn’t care about him or his motivations, and the fact that he kept taking up screen time annoyed me. A lot. We had so many other characters who were so much more interesting, and we were saddled with that jackass instead. (And, yes, we are definitely going to talk about the most infuriating detail about him soon enough.)

8. On the other hand, the Kurokos (or “black children”), the horde of screeching, masked attack minions were CREEPY AS HELL, and I loved every second of them. Like, when they show up at the abandoned warehouse in Episode 3…brrrrr—legitimately unsettling. And a great fight scene. Well, minus some of the shaky cam. But their screeching noises…soooo good. 

9. Relatedly: I totally caught the hint that something was up at the abandoned building when Tae-sang shines his flashlight up at Chae-ok as he talks to her: she is in frame with her shadow cast on the wall that we can see through an open door behind her—except it’s not her shadow. No, what we see (but easily ignore) is actually one of the Kurokos following after her at the exact same pace as she’s walking. 

Now, admittedly, I didn’t know what it was I was seeing, but I knew it wasn’t her shadow—because it was the wrong shape. Creeeeeeeeeeped me out. So good!

10. The guy playing Tae-sang does a much better job fitting the tone of the world around him, this time. I can’t tell you if that owes to something at the script level or the directing level, but I was glad to see it, regardless. 

11. I desperately hoped Lady Maeda would be back, somehow—but when they trucked out the old Japanese lady and literally called her “Lady Maeda,” it didn’t fool me for a second. I mean, I cheered when I saw she was in Lady Maeda’s house, but I didn’t ever think that she was supposed to be the Lady Maeda. 

12. …but you bet your life I cheered like a madman when actual Lady Maeda showed up. She was the best thing in the series—no way they’d leave her out!

12A. Now, at the time, I couldn’t remember anything about the wrap up for her character in the first one beyond her still being alive and in a wheelchair, so I didn’t have a clue how she was alive and standing and young—and I DID NOT CARE. They could explain it, not explain it, whatever, didn’t matter: she was back, and that’s all I needed to know. 

12B. Of course, they pretty quickly recap what happened to her, and I remembered that Kato from Unit 731 visited her and offered her one of the super-worms, which is how she’s still alive and still young and all that. But, genuinely, she could have been blown to smithereens in S1, and I would have accepted that she was back, no questions asked. 

12C. And I don’t know that I even need to say this, but Lady Maeda is still rad as f***. Such a great villain. And Claudia Kim is excellent. I could watch an entire series of just her calmly speaking at people as she stares at them. 

12D. …and they don’t spend anywhere near enough time on her and her revenge scheme. She has a scene taunting Chae-ok, and it’s great; but it’s also way too short. Same with her confrontation with Tae-sang, later on, after he’s gotten his memories back. She’s so good! And these conflicts she has with Tae-sang being “taken away” from her are great! Do more with this!

12E. But no. Which is what it is. She wasn’t in the first season quite enough, either, so maybe it’s not a surprise we didn’t get to dig into her a bit more with this one, either. At least she doesn’t get killed off in a ridiculous manner or anything. 

12F.

12G. WHO GIVES A F*** IF ANIME ANTAGONIST PUNK WAS NEVER LOVED BY HIS SURROGATE MOTHER?! WHY DOES HE GET TO KILL HER?!?!?!

12H. Ugh. I mean, yes, she clearly deserves to be killed—she’s a horrible person, a true villain beyond the shadow of a doubt. But…she meets her end at the hands not of our heroes but of some new character whose history with her got dumped on us in just the previous episode?! Are you KIDDING me with this nonsense?! F*** you, that’s not how you get rid of Lady-f***ing-Maeda. 

12I. “Oh, but the punishment is half being burned to ash by her horrible creations, half being discarded as unimportant by both Tae-sang and Chae-ok! She dies as an afterthought, Daryl—and at the hands of her husband’s child with a Korean woman! Don’t you see how fitting it is for her to—”   Shut your mouth, hypothetical netizen who wasn’t watching the show pretty much just for the return of Lady Maeda. YOU DON’T KNOW MY PAIN!

12J. …seriously, though, it was such a stupid way to have her exit the show. I mean, sure, the burned-to-ash part was really fitting, and I’m happy they let us sit with that for a long while, making it almost as beautiful as it was…twisted to watch it for so long, an almost sadistic glee in seeing such a horrible woman melt into nothingness after all of her crimes. But why would her “son” be the one to do it? I can’t wrap my head around how dumb that is—not because I hate him (...not just because I hate him), but because his ties to her are so much less meaningful to the audience than if it was either of the protagonists. Oh, her heartlessness came back to bite her, her mistreatment of Koreans came back to bite her—fine, but why make it someone you have to exposition dump into existence? It’s just so stupid. I mean, it was bad enough that it was OBVIOUS that the show was immediately going to nerf her so that the protagonists could more easily take her down, but…this? Ugh, I hate it so much,

12K. …and I will absolutely get over it if she’s inexplicably back in Season 3. Just FYI. 

13. Chae-ok taking heroin(?) to take the edge off of her bloodlust after she heals her wounds is just sort of a throwaway detail, I guess. No room for it to be more than that, presumably, so…did we need it? I mean, yes, insofar as we’d need an explicit explanation for why she wasn’t doing it when the other parts of the story indicate that sucking people’s brains out of their heads is, like, standard operating procedure for super-worm people. Of course, you could also do away with that and not have to worry about any of it. But, if you want the dramatic “It’s okay for you to eat my brains” flashback for Tae-sang and Grandma…golly, what a catch-22. 

14. Speaking of: they totally wussed out on that scene where Tae-sang is deliberately left with Grandma so he has to eat her brains. I was all excited that he was going to wake up to find that he’d killed his surrogate family or was going to fail to stop himself from doing it…but no. No, the men are already dead, and Grandma explicitly gives him permission to do it. Which, yes, isn’t much less traumatic for him, but it makes it more palatable to the audience. Which I thought was kinda lame. 

15. The actress playing the cop lady was…not great. I don’t remember her being a bad actress on Frankly Speaking (though maybe she was; I’d have to go back), but she wasn’t good in this. That said, I don’t know that I put all the blame on the actress, though, because the character is written very strangely. She’s the naive go-getter rookie whose instincts are decent but not yet honed…but also she’s sort of this dopey comic relief character as the show goes on, to the point where her being attacked by Kurokos is more played for laughs than you’d think it would be. 

16. Relatedly: when the anime antagonist guy attacks Tae-sang at his home base, the cop lady hears the fight on the listening device she planted in his office and rushes into the office. She draws her gun as she makes her way into the building, and all I could think was that she’s got those standard two blanks in her revolver and how utterly useless it’s going to be against an attacker to have to pull the trigger three times before she can do anything to him. 

17. I didn’t really have all that many notes for this show, but—unsurprisingly—almost half of them are specifically about Lady Maeda. So, I’m just going to cram them into this section for your convenience:

• All of the people who work at the biotech firm refer to Lady Maeda as “Maeda-san,” even when speaking to each other in Korean. 

• …though, again, they should be calling her Maeda-sama. 

• Lady Maeda consistently refers to the Korean girl her husband impregnated by her Japanese pseudonym, Akiko, but gave the boy Akiko gave birth to, whom she is raising as her “son,” a Korean name. Make of that what you will.

• It did not escape my notice that Lady Maeda is reintroduced to the story in a white dress, and she exits the story in a black dress. (And looks totally badass in both. Just FYI.)

18. Okay, absolutely unrelated to any of this…and I cannot remember if I’ve already asked you this, but have you seen Lord of the Rings? I’m not saying the entire future of our relationship hangs on your answer, but…I’m not saying it doesn't. 

19. In what appears to be a weird production decision, both Chae-ok and Tae-sang look worn out and, well, old in the first few episodes of the season. When we see them later, they look better, but the first few episodes are…not kind to the actors. I dunno if that’s to show the passage of time, the emotional toll of their lives for the last 80 years, or…a third thing. But I immediately was like, “Whoa, what happened to Princess My Name?!” And then I saw him and was like, “Did they film this in 8K and not realize it? Have the actors not slept? What happened?” So…I dunno. 

20. I don’t know if you noticed, but when she follows him in Episode 1 and they have a little tussle before she realizes he’s him, it’s a repeat of how they first meet in S1. It was suuuuuuper-duper subtle, y’know, and not at all silly. 

21. I’m calling b.s. on the old photo of Tae-sang with his pal from the past that’s been folded back to fit in the frame and just show the friend and not him—not because it’s super-convenient that the folded picture fits perfectly into a picture frame but because it’s twice the size of the other photos that were taken at the exact same time with the exact same camera. Can you do that? Of course. Would this have been done? No. There’d be no reason to. Well, except so that you could fold it in half and easily find a picture frame that the folded photo would fit into as though it was not folded at all. 

22. As much as I loved the action-focused nature of the season, there was a point at which the protagonists were so over-competent as to clearly never be in any real danger. I mean, of course they were always going to make it through the fights because they’re the protagonists—that’s not what I mean. I’m saying that the way in which all the goons they had to fight seemed not to be able to lay a glove on either Chae-ok or especially Tae-sang after he gets his super-worm back took all the stakes out of the fight scenes. I mean, Tae-sang is literally the only one who injures Chae-ok in the fight to escape the underground facility. They survive not through some kind of ingenuity on their parts but because they are so super-powered that the super-powered bad guys are just cannon fodder to them. Which is boring. 

23. And, just in point of fact, we do get a Tae-sang “I’m racist against the Japanese—as we should all be” speech in this show, as well. It’s just the one time, but it’s there. So…it’s good to see no one took a step back and rethought how they should shape Tae-sang’s anger and change in temperament because of what he lived through in Season 1. I mean, I’m rolling my eyes over it, but I guess I can’t be that annoyed that they’re at least consistent about this detail that totally undercut his core character trait. Sigh.

And that’s that—whatever that is, I guess. 

So, yeah, I had a good time with it, though it’s absolutely a much less substantive story than the first season. I’m still not sure why we needed it or what it was supposed to add to the first part of the story, but…fun is fun, y’know? 

Speaking of, I hope you’re having fun. Just, like, with whatever it is you’re up to, these days. Jetsetting, probably. Because you found an untapped copper mine in your basement and are now a multi-millionaire. You’ve spent the weekend filling yourself with the best pastries in Paris, and now you’re off to lounge on the beaches of Bora Bora for a few days. Catch up on some reading. 

Such a cool cat, our Erin. 

Anyway—more soon. 

—Daryl